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Word and Excel are probably worth running Windows/Mac over Linux GUI alone if you have to spend any time in them, which I do in a non-Microsoft stack for busine

Word and Excel are probably worth running Windows/Mac over Linux GUI alone if you have to spend any time in them, which I do in a non-Microsoft stack for business-related things. I'd imagine most people have to spend some non-negligible time in these. O365/open source office products come nowhere close.

ACS_Solver 7y ago
I read often on HN how Excel is used a lot, but I don't really understand the use cases. If you're a software developer, what would you use Excel for? Maybe it's because I work for small companies, but I've almost never had Excel come up at work, and in the few cases where it did, LibreOffice was sufficient because those were very small and simple sheets. 95% of my work has always been in the source tree (so git), some kind of ticket or project software (Jira, redmine, etc), and a wiki-like documentation system (Confluence, mediawiki). And of the remaining 5% most would be some kind of stuff with a Web interface on the network. I'm pretty sure I haven't edited a Word doc for 5 years. Is this really the exception I get to encounter because of avoiding "corporate" companies?
- sl1ck731 7y ago
  I've seen anything and everything passed around in Excel. Project timelines, infrastructure descriptions/allocations, working on systems that allow users to deposit parts of their workflows via spreadsheets (financial related), some RFPs come and are returned in Excel form. I can't speak to any exceptions but I personally use Word and Excel semi-daily. I also believe there are a variety of people on HN beyond traditional strictly software devs. DevOps, Cloud-related (myself), Product Managers, Project Managers and the like.
Nullabillity 7y ago
> Word 99% of uses can be trivially replaced by plain text, Markdown, or Org. For the others you probably want a real typesetting system anyway, so Word would still not be appropriate. > Excel If you're at a point where it feels appropriate to use vendor-specific spreadsheet features then you have already outgrown by far spreadsheets. It's probably both simpler and more maintainable to decouple your data from your code by using a database (even SQLite, if you still want to pass files around) and/or a scripting language instead.
- sl1ck731 7y ago
  My main use cases for MS Word is RFP responses, architecture descriptions, requirement definitions. Neither of those options would satisfy that an an inter-operable way with the rest of the relevant people. I guess if you're purely writing code all day then I could understand never needing productivity suites, but I assume most roles have either customer-facing or organizational interactions beyond consuming Jira tickets. Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    > RFP responses This might as well just be a PDF. The source format shouldn't matter if the recipient is just going to read it. > architecture descriptions, requirement definitions A hierarchical plain text document (biasing towards Org if you want internal links) would satisfy the same use case and play much better with source control. > Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them. It's not a binary. I don't particularly like Python or SQLite, but I'd take a couple of quick and dirty Python+SQLite scripts over a bunch of unstructured spreadsheets any day.
    - sl1ck731 7y ago
      All of those things are collaborative. Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown. Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.
      - Nullabillity 7y ago
        > All of those things are collaborative. Indeed. So why on earth would you pay for tools that make all version control systems barf? > Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown. It's not that hard. Ask a random nine-year-old to come up with a formatting syntax and they'd likely come up with something with a canny resemblence Org. > Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft. Why would you use a overcomplicated WYSIWYG editor to make a few things bold and add a list? Why would you pay for that miserable experience?

ACS_Solver 7y ago

I read often on HN how Excel is used a lot, but I don't really understand the use cases. If you're a software developer, what would you use Excel for? Maybe it's because I work for small companies, but I've almost never had Excel come up at work, and in the few cases where it did, LibreOffice was sufficient because those were very small and simple sheets. 95% of my work has always been in the source tree (so git), some kind of ticket or project software (Jira, redmine, etc), and a wiki-like documentation system (Confluence, mediawiki). And of the remaining 5% most would be some kind of stuff with a Web interface on the network. I'm pretty sure I haven't edited a Word doc for 5 years. Is this really the exception I get to encounter because of avoiding "corporate" companies?

sl1ck731 7y ago
I've seen anything and everything passed around in Excel. Project timelines, infrastructure descriptions/allocations, working on systems that allow users to deposit parts of their workflows via spreadsheets (financial related), some RFPs come and are returned in Excel form. I can't speak to any exceptions but I personally use Word and Excel semi-daily. I also believe there are a variety of people on HN beyond traditional strictly software devs. DevOps, Cloud-related (myself), Product Managers, Project Managers and the like.

Nullabillity 7y ago

> Word 99% of uses can be trivially replaced by plain text, Markdown, or Org. For the others you probably want a real typesetting system anyway, so Word would still not be appropriate. > Excel If you're at a point where it feels appropriate to use vendor-specific spreadsheet features then you have already outgrown by far spreadsheets. It's probably both simpler and more maintainable to decouple your data from your code by using a database (even SQLite, if you still want to pass files around) and/or a scripting language instead.

sl1ck731 7y ago
My main use cases for MS Word is RFP responses, architecture descriptions, requirement definitions. Neither of those options would satisfy that an an inter-operable way with the rest of the relevant people. I guess if you're purely writing code all day then I could understand never needing productivity suites, but I assume most roles have either customer-facing or organizational interactions beyond consuming Jira tickets. Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  > RFP responses This might as well just be a PDF. The source format shouldn't matter if the recipient is just going to read it. > architecture descriptions, requirement definitions A hierarchical plain text document (biasing towards Org if you want internal links) would satisfy the same use case and play much better with source control. > Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them. It's not a binary. I don't particularly like Python or SQLite, but I'd take a couple of quick and dirty Python+SQLite scripts over a bunch of unstructured spreadsheets any day.
  - sl1ck731 7y ago
    All of those things are collaborative. Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown. Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      > All of those things are collaborative. Indeed. So why on earth would you pay for tools that make all version control systems barf? > Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown. It's not that hard. Ask a random nine-year-old to come up with a formatting syntax and they'd likely come up with something with a canny resemblence Org. > Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft. Why would you use a overcomplicated WYSIWYG editor to make a few things bold and add a list? Why would you pay for that miserable experience?